Dealing With AAA Title Launch Bugs and/or Less Features Than Expected

[heids24]

There are several big name games that have recently been launched with launch bugs and / or are defeatured with plans to patch improvements into the game in the future. Some examples are below...

I bought Skyrim on day 1. Played it for about 2 hours and being the elitist pc gamer that I am was slightly disappointed by some of the low res textures and consolized menu structures. Knowing that the pc community would never stand for this, I put the game on the shelf and am deciding to wait for inevitable library of mods to flood the community that turn Skyrim into a more representative pc game.

In addition, I bought Arkham City a week ago and found that there are DX11 issues and the dev is working on a patch. Rather than playing in DX10, I've decided to shelf this game as well and wait for the DX11 improvement patch.

Same with Crysis 2. No DX11 at launch but they stated they were going to patch it in at a later date. So the game sat on my hard drive until the DX11 patch came.

I never replay games once I finish them, so since I've spend plenty of $$$ on my system and I'm only going to play through the game once, I figured I would rather wait until the game is ready to be played at its highest quality. I guess that begs the question of why I buy new pc games at launch...maybe I'm just an eternal optimist who thinks one of these times a major pc game will be launched without any major flaws. Nonetheless, it doesn't get my attention until it is patched to the point where it was meant to be played.

So you just bought a AAA title that has some launch bugs and/or less features than promised or expected. What do you do?

 

[bystander]

It depends on the game. Skyrim actually is quite bug free if you download the 4gb hack. I played for a few days with occasional crashes, then they patched it and it started crashing a lot. After a day of that I searched out a fix and came across a 4gb hack (the game is limited to 2gb with the release version). Since the fix, I have played probably 20-30 hours without a crash or bug.

At the same time, I did not purchase Crysis 2 until they released the DX11 patch.

 

[jaguarskx]

I typically do not buy games on launch date and I usually wait a couple of months before buying the game.

The only exception was Fallout 3 which I bought from Best Buy the day it was launched. I had a gift card I needed to kill.

 

[Supernova1138]

I also tend to not buy games at launch, usually wait for them to go on sale or for the price to drop. That way I can afford to spend more on better hardware so the games run better. There aren't too many games that I would consider to be a day one purchase. Sadly, I have got burned with Arkham City and its horrible PC port. I'm playing LA Noire which I got 50% off on Steam while I wait for Rocksteady to patch Arkham City, I refuse to play the game in DX9 when DX11 is just sitting right there, only slightly out of reach.

 

[13thmonkey]

I used to not buy them at launch, but wait for a few months, but BF3 and Skyrim were too tempting. But in my experience they work, nearly 50hrs on Skyrim, with perhaps 10 crashes. The textures are the textures, what I expect and what is delivered are two seperate things, but whats delivered is what is. I know that sykrim is not that resource hungry, would I like it to use my system to the max, perhaps.

I updated one of the stalkers with mod packs, and noticed not a lot of difference to be honest in texture quality etc. When moving its a case emperor's new clothes, and you'll see what you want to see, when stationary then there's a difference, how oftenm are you stationary?

However I am generally now of the opinion that I'll be waiting, especially where there is no demo. I do however replay games, I can see at least 2 more replays of skyrim, forcing myself down a different character path. Stalkers have had probably 2-3 replays each.